Moneyball (2011)

Moneyball Synopsis

Based on a true story, Moneyball is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs. The onetime jock teams with Ivy League grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in an unlikely partnership, recruiting bargain players that the scouts call flawed, but all of whom have an ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. It’s more than baseball, it’s a revolution – one that challenges old school traditions and puts Beane in the crosshairs of those who say he’s tearing out the heart and soul of the game.

I don’t think that Moneyball is a political film. I don’t think that director Bennett Miller saw Beane as a proxy for Obama and I don’t think the movie sways to either side of the political scale. How could it? Michael Lewis wrote “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” in 2003 and the movie chronicles the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season. But no movie released in 2011 better represents the era in which we are living

The right campaigning can certainly help Oscar contenders, so who better to advise Brad Pitt on how to go up against the likes of The Artist than Jon Stewart? Pitt visited Comedy Central’s The Daily Show last night and spoke with Stewart about Moneyball and the Oscar race.

To celebrate the release of the wonderful Moneyball on Blu-Ray and DVD, Cinema Blend has put together a list of some of our favorite movie characters who changed the status quo. Some of them instituted lasting alterations, others simply shook things up teams briefly, but the impact of all was tangible.

This list started as an unfilled Word document saying “Best Movies” on January 1st , and it ended with over one hundred films that have been obsessively tweaked. There’s no ulterior motives and no efforts to impress behind the choices I’ve made. These are just the ones I liked a little bit more than the rest.

As both a film critic and reporter, I have to sit through a lot of terrible movies. This year I spent hours of my life watching movies like New Year’s Eve, Spy Kids: All The Time in the World, Abduction and Waiting For Forever. But it’s the good movies that make it all worth it, and this year there were some truly brilliant films in release. But among those great titles, what were my favorites? Well…

Much like 2010, this year was packed with not only amazing soundtracks, but also movies that knew how to use songs to perfect effect. From the synth sounds in Drive to the insanely happy tunes in The Muppets, this year in music moments made audiences feel unending joy and devastating sadness, but it all made for great times at the cinema.

Even without Moneyball, Lewis should have enough juice to get a studio interested in adapting his nonfiction works. He wrote the book on which John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side was based. Yet now, with back-to-back Hollywood hits, Lewis really has the ability to push his projects into development, and he’s putting that newly acquired power to the test.

Kill adapts Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s manga comic about a young soldier fighting in an intergalactic conflict who dies on the day the aliens invade our planet. But in a strange, Twilight Zone-inspired plot twist, the soldier is repeatedly resurrected to the day before the day he dies, allowing him to fight on. The site says rewrites have corrected issues the studio had with Dante Harper’s script, and they’re ready to go ahead of Pitt’s interested

I talked to Miller during what must have been an exhausting jaunt through the Toronto Film Festival, just a few weeks before Moneyball was set to open in theaters (it's out starting tomorrow). He opened up about how he and Brad Pitt decided a common goal for telling the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's, how Beane's personal story is what defines the film

With Pitt on the brain, we're setting out to change that perception of him as a handsome guy who can't act his way out of a paper bag. As it turns out, he's got an entire career's worth of excellent performances to prove his talent, starting even in his earliest days as more of a pin-up boy than the Hollywood powerhouse he is today. Here are five examples of Pitt performances that don't just prove he's got talent

I’m giddy. I’m jumping around the room. I can barely contain myself. What a freaking week this is for making fun of movies. I mean we’ve got a shirt-wearing Lautner. A finless dolphin. A moneyless baseball team. And a never harmless Jason Statham.

Pratt knows you probably know him as Andy, which might be part of why he fought so hard to play Scott Hatteberg in Moneyball, the new adaptation of Michael Lewis's bestselling book about how the Oakland A's used complicated statistics to become a championship-level team on virtually no money. Hatteberg was a former catcher recruited when he was let go from the Boston Red Sox after rupturing a nerve in his elbow

For this year's festival I'll be trying a slightly different method of reviews, combining regular video blogs with what I've seen that day with short mini-reviews of each film (with longer versions to come either when they are released or later in the festival). Today we've got Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, Bennett Miller's Moneyball and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus on deck

It was always an uphill battle for Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane. When he first signed on to the team he was neutralized because the organization didn't have enough money to afford quality players. Then he worked to devise a new system of scouting that would allow him to target cheaper players, but the organization didn't even want to spend a little money on what they saw as a major risk.

Adapted from the Michael Lewis book by Oscar winners Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, the story centers on Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the Oakland A's who can't improve his team due to lack of resources. When he meets a young kid named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) everything changes.

September, with its promise of cool weather and great movies, is just around the corner, and here at Cinema Blend we're already marking our calendars for the best of what's to come. We all picked one movie coming up in September that we're really looking forward to, whether they're festival hits we've already gotten to see, like Eric and Drive, or promising comedies that seem to make the most of our beloved stars, like Mack and What's Your Number

Who doesn't love a great baseball movie? Sure, there are people out there that don't like the sport and find it boring (Note: I don't understand you), but it's impossible to deny that the two work together like spaghetti and meatballs. From Field of Dreams to Bull Durham and from Pride of the Yankees to The Sandlot, it's a legacy that's hard to tarnish

Moneyball is the next movie for Brad Pitt and it’s based on the book of the same name. It tells the true story of how Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s, revolutionized baseball by ignoring conventional wisdom and building a championship team his way. Jonah Hill and Phillip Seymour Hoffman co-star.

When the first trailer for Moneyball dropped last month one thought was going through my head constantly: a movie about baseball statistics shouldn't look this amazing. When you have Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian working on the script and Brad Pitt starring, however, it's a whole new ballgame (if you'll pardon the pun).

The two actors will team for Good Time Gang, a film that’s being set up through RCR Pictures and penned by Max Landis (son of the legendary John Landis). Wahlberg and Hill would play “party-happy mercenaries” -- which automatically sounds bizarre

In 2002, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane decided to use a different strategy when finding players to be a part of his baseball organization. Without the resources of a team in cities like New York or Chicago, Beane decided fill his roster with players that weren't power hitters or all stars, but rather knew how to get on base.

I'm reserving judgment on this until we've seen anything resembling a full trailer, but I do like what we're seeing so far. It might be a natural weakness for baseball movies, or it might be because director Bennett Miller has managed the impossible task

While some movie sets-- particularly the ones involving superheroes or robots-- will stay on lockdown to avoid even the tiniest bits of information leaking out to the public, the people behind Moneyball

There's no talk of when production might begin, but presumably they'd like to have the movie out while the financial crisis is fresh in peoples' minds, especially since all that explanation of credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities won't stick in our minds forever

After what seems like a thousand years in development and director changes and all kind of nonsense, Sony's adaptation of Moneyball is finally ready to start filming, with Brad Pitt miraculously still on board after all that

Deadline makes the comparison to another movie based on a nonfiction sports book by Michael Lewis, The Blind Side, for which Sandra Bullock starred for a paltry $2.5 million but is getting very, very rich

But Pitt is a guy who clearly likes a challenge-- he's still attached to Moneyball, a movie about baseball statistics, with Bennett Miller directing. God bless him for sinking his teeth into what interests him

Right now it feels like Moneyball will always be "that movie that they kicked Steven Soderbergh off of," especially since they've yet to hire a director, 4 months after deciding to keep the project going without him

The question "What's next?" has a lot of answers, including a biopic about Liberace and Cleo, a 3-D rock musical about Cleopatra. He talks about it all in the Sentinel article, calling Cleo "a total party"

Not only did Sony turn Soderbergh down when he attempted to make his version of Michael Lewis' book Moneyball, they've now kicked him off the project entirely. Brad Pitt will still star in the film, and Sony will still make it, but Sodbergh is no longer on board as director

Well, so much for getting a thoroughly unique baseball movie. Over the last several months, news has gotten around that Steven Soderbergh's Moneyball, based on the statistic heavy book of the same name

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would be interested in this movie, even with the added value of Pitt and Martin. Remember, Soderbergh is a guy who made not one but two movies about Che Guevara wandering around in a jungle